Garlic can reproduce in three ways — from its cloves, from bulbils that it produces in its umbel, and through seeds that develop in ovaries located in the umbel.

Over time garlic has evolved and drifted away from reproducing by true seeds, with cloves and bulbils its preferred method to propagate itself.

That drift has become so pronounced that without some help, the vast majority of garlic varieties today are actually incapable of reproducing via seed in the wild.

That’s both good and bad news for garlic growers. The good news is that it is now very easy to grow garlic from cloves but the downside is that there is far less genetic diversity than if garlic still propagated via seed.

New garlic varieties can only come about via spontaneous mutations and hybrids bred for the best traits of different garlic types can’t be created, as each planted clove is simply a clone of its parent.